Radiation tolerance studies using fault injection on the Readout Control FPGA design of the ALICE TPC detector

Single Event Upsets (SEUs) are a major concern for the TPC Readout Control Unit (RCU) of the ALICE experiment. A SEU is defined as a radiation related bit-flip in a memory cell, and a SEU in the onboard SRAM based FPGA of the RCU may lead to corrupted data or, even worse, a system malfunction. The latter situation will affect the operation of the ALICE detector since it causes a premature end of data taking. Active partial reconfiguration is utilized in a dedicated reconfiguration solution on the RCU, and this makes it possible to implement fault injection. Fault injection means inserting bit flips in the configuration memory of the FPGA in a controlled laboratory environment. This paper presents the results of the fault injection study and shows how this result can be combined with SEU measurements to estimate the functional failure rate as a function of luminosity.